Daniel and the Prince of Persia

He counted. That is the part I want you to hold before anything else — not the fasting, not the burning figure by the river, but an old man in Persia counting days, and reaching twenty-one, and hearing nothing.

Three weeks he mourned. He ate no bread of delight; flesh and wine came not to his mouth; with oil he did not anoint himself. Daniel was very old by then. He had outlived Nebuchadnezzar's furnace and Belshazzar's ruined feast and the night among the lions, and he had lived to see Cyrus of Persia — the king I called my anointed through Isaiah, whose right hand I grasped to open gates before him — sign the decree that sent my exiles home. He had been given the one thing he had prayed for across a lifetime in exile. And still he mourned, because a word had been laid on him concerning what would come to his people, and he could not see into it, and to be handed a word you cannot understand is its own kind of hunger.

So he set his heart on understanding. And for twenty-one days, so far as he could tell, the heavens were shut.

Sit inside those days a moment before I tell you what was in them, because that is where most of you live. You have counted too. The mornings you got up early for it. The meals you refused. The week you were sure would be the week. And the silence that met you had the texture of a door, and you drew from it the conclusion every honest person draws — that either you had not been heard, or you had been heard and judged not worth an answer.

On the twenty-fourth day of the first month he was standing on the bank of the great river, the Tigris, and he lifted his eyes. There was a man clothed in linen, his waist bound with gold of Uphaz, his body with the gleam of chrysolite, his face with the look of lightning, his eyes like torches of fire, the voice of his words like the sound of a throng. The men beside Daniel saw nothing at all; a great trembling took them and they ran and hid themselves, for those who see least are often the first to run. Daniel was left standing alone, and the strength drained out of him, and his face went down to the ground.

Then a hand touched him and set him shaking on his knees and the palms of his hands. And the messenger said the sentence this whole page exists to put into your hands:

Since the first day you gave your heart to understanding and to afflicting yourself before your God, your words were heard; and I myself have come on account of your words.

The first day. Not the twenty-first. Not the day his fasting had finally reached some weight that tipped a scale, not the day he had suffered enough to deserve a reply — the first day, the first hour he turned his face toward me and began. There was never a moment in those three weeks when he was praying into an empty room. The answer had been on the road since the beginning. He simply had not seen it arrive.

Now hear what the delay was, and refuse to hear anything else in it. The prince of the kingdom of Persia stood against me twenty-one days; and behold, Michael, one of the foremost princes, came to my aid. Twenty-one days of contention among powers Daniel could not see, over a man kneeling by a river who knew nothing about it. I will not draw a curtain across that. There are wills in creation that set themselves against what I send, and their resistance is real, and it costs something to come through it. Daniel's three weeks of nothing were not three weeks of nothing. They were three weeks of a battle he was never shown.

But mark exactly where the delay lay and where it did not. It was not in the hearing. It was not in the deciding. It was never in me.

And do not take the thing Daniel was shown in the unseen and hang it around the neck of any land or any people on earth. I did not open that curtain so that you could look at your neighbour differently. The very book that names that prince also names Cyrus of Persia as my anointed, the man whose hand I held. Persia is not the villain of this chapter. Persia is the ground the prayer was heard on.

The messenger touched Daniel again when the last of his breath had gone, so that his mouth could open at all, and touched him a third time to put strength back into him, and said: Do not be afraid, man held precious. Peace to you. Be strong — and be strong. Twice strong, because once is not enough for a man who has just learned what the room he prays in is really like.

Then he went back into it. Now I go back to do battle with the prince of Persia; and as I go out, behold, the prince of Greece is coming. He did not stay to be thanked. He told Daniel plainly that no one holds firm at my side in all this except Michael, your prince — and he went. The comfort was not the end of the war. It was a word handed to a man standing in the middle of one.

So count your days, if you must count them. Only do not read your silence the way Daniel read his. What you are calling unanswered may only be untravelled.

I heard you on the first day.

The Record

Daniel 10 opens the book's final vision, which runs to the end of chapter 12. It is dated to the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia, and set on the bank of the Tigris on the twenty-fourth day of the first month. The chapter belongs to the Hebrew portion of the book (8:1–12:13); chapters 2:4–7:28 are in Aramaic. Daniel's fast lasts three "weeks of days" (Daniel 10:2–3) — a Hebrew idiom marking these as literal weeks, in contrast to the "weeks" of years in Daniel 9. Since the first month is Nisan, commentators have long observed that the three weeks would have spanned Passover and the feast of Unleavened Bread.

The messenger is never named. Gabriel is named twice in the preceding visions (Daniel 8:16 and 9:21), and an ancient tradition identifies him with the figure of chapter 10, but the chapter itself withholds a name, and the identification cannot be drawn from the text.

Michael, by contrast, is named. He is one of the foremost princes who comes to the messenger's aid (10:13) and the only one who holds firm with him, called "Michael, your prince" (10:21) — that is, Israel's; he is named a third time at Daniel 12:1 as the great prince who stands over Daniel's people. This is the scriptural seed of Michael's later patronage, first of Israel and afterwards, in Christian tradition, of the Church.

The reading of these "princes" as angelic powers set over nations has a long history rather than the standing of doctrine. Jerome, commenting on the chapter, takes the prince of Persia as the angel of the Persian kingdom opposing Daniel's petitions, Michael as the angel charged with the people of Israel, and "chief princes" to mean archangels. Thomas Aquinas cites Daniel 10:13 in the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 113, a. 8) when asking whether there can be strife among the angels, and answers that the apparent resistance concerns the differing merits of peoples as searched out in the divine wisdom, not any division in angelic wills; the same question assigns the care of whole communities to the higher angelic orders (I, q. 113, a. 3). The Church holds the existence and ministry of angels as a truth of faith (CCC 328–336), but has never taught that any nation, people, or culture stands under demonic rule. The same Scripture that records the prince of Persia calls Cyrus, king of Persia, the Lord's anointed, whose right hand God grasped to open gates before him and release the exiles (Isaiah 45:1; Ezra 1:1–4).

On date and composition: the narrative setting is the sixth century BC, while Catholic and wider scholarship places the book's final form in the persecution under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, 167–164 BC, with the court tales of chapters 1–6 likely drawing on older material. The introduction to Daniel in the New American Bible Revised Edition states the later dating plainly and classes the book as an early specimen of apocalyptic rather than prophecy. The dispute is itself ancient: the third-century philosopher Porphyry argued that the book was composed in the age of Antiochus, and Jerome answered him at length. The "prince of Greece" of 10:20 belongs to the same Hellenistic horizon as the visions of chapters 8 and 11.

Daniel 10:12 — that the words were heard on the first day — is frequently invoked in Catholic spiritual writing on perseverance in prayer, and answers directly to difficulties the Catechism names in its treatment of the battle of prayer: disappointment at not being heard according to our own will, and filial trust proved in tribulation (CCC 2725–2745, especially 2728 and 2734). All renderings of Daniel above are made from the Clementine Vulgate and the Masoretic Hebrew.